Hi Carlos,

> I’m not asking “will this always save energy and how much?”  I’m asking “how 
> is the mechanism evaluated rigorously?”  
> 
> IOW, I’m asking for an evaluation model to be discussed and included — not an 
> operational conclusion. A “how”, not a number. 
> 
> My concern is that you are evaluating gross savings. And I am suggesting we 
> care more about net savings. And eval mechanism ought to account for both:  
> * the energy savings enabled by consolidation/idling, and 
> * the incremental energy cost introduced by the mechanism itself.
> 
> It’s a methodology question — not a quantity or even simulation output one. 


Ok, I believe that I’ve already talked about the energy savings.  Thus, the 
remainder of the question is about the costs.  Those costs come in two flavors: 
direct costs and indirect costs.

The direct costs are easy to describe and difficult to quantify.  We are adding 
additional information to the IGP. This must be flooded. This information must 
be used during path computation. The additional considerations for power 
computation are going to consume a few dozen extra CPU cycles. The path, if 
changed, must be signaled and cut in.  This should only be considered if the 
change is due to power, as path changes are also common for other reasons.

I would estimate these direct costs at less than $1USD per day.

The indirect costs are larger and even more difficult to quantify without 
specifics. Someone in the operator’s network architecture group must create an 
initiative to power optimize their network. There will undoubtedly be endless 
meetings involving the network architecture group, the network engineering 
group, network executives, and the network operations group. They will consider 
all of the work done by their vendors, including meeting with the vendors, 
listening to marketing presentations, and evaluating the various offerings. 
Engineering will be asked to perform a differential design evaluation where 
each alternative is analyzed for their network. Operations will reject this 
evaluation and send it back for revisions. Three times. Pizza will be ordered. 
Coffee will be consumed. Voices will be raised. Finally, the executive in 
change of network architecture, who didn’t get enough sleep the night before, 
will make a decision based on non-technical inputs and choose the direction 
proposed by vendor X.  Vendor Y will protest, leading to another round of 
meetings, however, the decision will stand.  The engineering staff will then 
attempt to mock the deployment in the lab.  It will fail because of software 
issues in Vendor X’s implementation.  In parallel, operations will start the 
software developement project to enhance their configuration database and 
network management tools. After 6 weeks, vendor X will provide a patch.  This 
will also fail.  After 8 more weeks, vendor X will provide a second patch.  
This will again fail.  There will then be a big meeting of network engineering 
to discuss the situation. The head of engineering will then change directions 
and select Vendor Y’s approach. Operations will restart their software 
development project. The vendor code will be taken to the lab and will 
similarly fail.  However, after 8 weeks, vendor Y will provide a patch that 
actually works. This will be tested in the lab for three weeks and it will be 
approved for deployment.  Of course, this cannot be deployed until a software 
update is deployed for both vendor X's and vendor Y’s gear. Additional lab 
testing will cyclically reveal software issues in each release, resulting in 
numerous iterations with both vendors getting issues resolved. This will take 
another 17 months before software images pass the lab tests. Operations will 
then start to schedule maintenance windows for deployment. Due to the policies 
for incremental windows, this takes 3 months before the update is deployed. At 
that point, engineering can configure the feature and start to exercise it, 
starting to recoup power savings. This is all quite simplified, but should give 
you some understanding of the operator’s costs.

I would estimate these indirect costs at $24,665,664.37 USD.

Regards,
Tony

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